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2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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Empowering the next generation: ANS’s newest book focuses on careers in nuclear energy
A new career guide for the nuclear energy industry is now available: The Nuclear Empowered Workforce by Earnestine Johnson. Drawing on more than 30 years of experience across 16 nuclear facilities, Johnson offers a practical, insightful look into some of the many career paths available in commercial nuclear power. To mark the release, Johnson sat down with Nuclear News for a wide-ranging conversation about her career, her motivation for writing the book, and her advice for the next generation of nuclear professionals.
When Johnson began her career at engineering services company Stone & Webster, she entered a field still reeling from the effects of the Three Mile Island incident in 1979, nearly 15 years earlier. Her hiring cohort was the first group of new engineering graduates the company had brought on since TMI, a reflection of the industry-wide pause in nuclear construction. Her first long-term assignment—at the Millstone site in Waterford, Conn., helping resolve design issues stemming from TMI—marked the beginning of a long and varied career that spanned positions across the country.
Risto Harjula, Jukka Lehto, Esko H. Tusa, Asko Paavola
Nuclear Technology | Volume 107 | Number 3 | September 1994 | Pages 272-278
Technical Paper | Radioactive Waste Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT94-A35007
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An industrial scale process utilizing hexacyanoferrate-based ion exchangers was developed for the selective separation of radioactive cesium from nuclear waste solutions. This process was put into operation at the Loviisa Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) (pressurized water reactor, VVER-440), Finland, at the end of 1991, and it has shown superiority to any other cesium separation method used at present at nuclear plants. This paper summarizes the work that was carried out in the development of this process. In the first phase of the work, the performance of several cesium-specific precipitants and ion exchangers (eg., zeolites and hexacyanoferrates) was tested by laboratory experiments. Based on these initial tests, two precipitants, sodium hexanitrocobaltate and tungstophosphoric acid, and two hexacyanoferrate exchangers were chosen for pilotscale experiments. These experiments showed that the hexacyanoferrate ion exchangers were the most efficient materials for the removal of 137Cs and 134Cs and were suitable for large-scale column operation. With hexacyanoferrates, decontamination factors (DFs) of several thousands and volume reduction factors (VRFs) in the range of 2000 to 10000, were obtained for 137Cs and 134Cs. By using the cesium-specific precipitants, DFs and VRFs on the order of 100 were feasible in the Loviisa concentrates. After the pilot experiments, an exchanger based on hexacyanoferrate was chosen to be used in the full-scale cesium-separation plant constructed at the Loviisa NPP.
